Stop measuring effort

Somewhere, someone made a terrible mistake.

It didn’t start out as a mistake. As with most innovations, it started with an attempt to make something better. A grand experiment, with the intended outcome of radically improving software development.

As with any experiment, it was a good idea at the time. Experimenting is how we improve and move forward.

This experiment had roots going back to the Industrial Era and manufacturing process. As Felix Lorenzo Torres and Herbert Benington theorized in the 1950's, we could apply those well-understood manufacturing processes to software development and achieve gains in reliability. The basic idea seemed to make sense, and looked pretty elegant:¹